The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Solid state memory devices have been in use for many years. The recent advances of low-cost high-density solid-state memory components have paved the way for the introduction of solid-state drives (SSD). Solid-state drives are less fragile than hard disks and are also silent. Solid-state drives also have faster read access times and lower latency times than conventional hard disk drives. This is because there are no mechanical parts and, therefore, no mechanical delays. Solid-state drives are being used in many computer applications.
A drawback of a solid-state drive is that the solid-state memory components have a limited lifetime. The memory components in a solid-state drive can only have data written to each memory block a relatively small number of times before the memory block loses its ability to retain data. This means that care must be taken to not perform a majority of write operations on localized areas of the solid-state drive.